THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 481 



Some six or eight hours after the meal Crawford awoke with a 

 violent headache in his forehead and eyes and soon suffered nausea, 

 the vomiting continuing with about half-hour intervals for several 

 hours. Ole was not ill and ate a moderate breakfast, but he began 

 to feel headache soon after and before noon had become almost as 

 ill as Crawford. Crawford's recovery was not quite as much 

 earlier than Ole's as the onset had been, but both were nearly well 

 by evening although they did not have good appetites. They de- 

 scribed the headache as being the worst either of them had ever 

 suffered. Natkusiak and I were not ill at all. 



Just about the same time, but unknown to us, Thomsen and 

 Storkerson made an experiment on bear liver. They have reported 

 that after a supper of fried liver they both awoke sometime before 

 their ordinary breakfast time with the most violent headache either 

 of them had ever had. Vomiting continued all day and they were 

 so sick that even the next day they felt v/eak and were with diffi- 

 culty able to travel. They said that there was nothing wrong with 

 the fat in which they fried the liver and nothing uncommon about 

 the other food ; in fact, there was nothing except the bear liver that 

 could be considered a possible cause of the illness. 



With these and similar experiments in the background, although 

 none had led to illness except the ones I have mentioned, we took 

 the liver of the bear killed when we landed at Cape Ross and 

 made one more experiment. We divided it evenly. It occurred 

 to me only later that there might have been an infection of some 

 sort in a particular lobe of the liver without its covering the whole 

 liver, and we should have eaten a slice from every part. This not 

 being thought of, we were not in a position to say later whether 

 one of us might have eaten from one part and another from an- 

 other. The only difference we knew was that some of us pre- 

 ferred the liver well done and others preferred it a little underdone. 

 It happened that those who preferred it underdone were the ones 

 that became ill, but this may have been a coincidence. 



We had the meal about ten P. M. and soon after that we went 

 to sleep. At about four in the morning Emiu was seized with 

 nausea which continued at half-hour intervals until noon, and he 

 had a violent headache. Wilkins had a slight headache but said 

 that he had had a similar headache for the two preceding days 

 and believed it to be connected with a slight attack of snowblind- 

 ness. He thought that if anything his neadache was milder than 

 yesterday. Castel had a slight frontal headache, not in the fore- 

 head and eyes as Emiu, but merely in the forehead back 



